AAUG Reviews

by Simone Lange ,AAUG Member

Blow Up is an automation plug-in that allows you to resize your images to about four times the size without artifacts and halos that Photoshop uses with its bicubic interpolation. Blow Up searches for the edges and larger areas within your image and then scales these areas similar to a vector image which is what allows it to reproduce and image with crisp contrast lines while smoothing out the jags that we sometimes see with enlarged images.

Since it is an automaton plug-in it will only work with Photoshop and Elements. You need to have at least Photoshop CS or later or Elements 3 or later to use it - Mac OS X/Plus it is compatible with Universal applications. Windows 2000/Windows XP/Vista. If you are using Leopard you have to get the update from the Alien Skin website or the product wonít work. Blow Up does support 8, 16 & 32 bit images, as well as RGB, CMYK, Lab, Grayscale and Duotone.

You can only load Blow Up into one graphic program at a time, so if you have both you have to load into each program individually. Once it is installed to access Blow Up you will find it under the Automation/Automate tools. When it is opened for Mac users you will see Blow Upís interface in place of your usual menu bar and for Windows users you will see the menus at the top of the plug-in window. If you are familiar with Photoshopís image size box then you should be very familiar with the layout. (more…)

by Jane Thomas, AAUG Member

Snap Art helps you turn photos into beautiful artwork in ten different art media with as little as a single step. Really - one step. With Snap Art’s ten Photoshop filters, you can get the look of watercolors or oil paintings or pencil sketches or pen and ink or comics and more.

Snap Art is a plug-in and must be used with one of the following host programs:
- Adobe Photoshop CS2 9.0.2 or later
- Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0.1 or later
- Adobe Fireworks CS3 (with some qualifications)

With one step, you can select one of the ten art media and then one of the 20 or so factory settings for that media. If that doesn’t give you the look you want, you can make adjustments to fine tune such things as the brush size, stroke curvature, pencil width, pencil pressure, stroke length, brightness, contrast, canvas thickness, lighting direction, highlight brightness, highlight color, and much more. If you like, you can save those settings to use again, this time with just a single step.

I’m a Photoshop Elements user and don’t come near tapping its capabilities. So when I say that Snap Art is easy to use, you can believe it. I’ve had fun turning landscape photos into water color-like images, changing a photo of a decorated Christmas tree into an Impasto image, and making posterized images of my nieces in their Halloween costumes. Quite cool! But my favorite has to be the pencil sketch of our little fluffy white dog, Bo Diddley. He’s so cute. (more…)

by Randy Brandon, AAUG Member

First things first.  This is a great idea!  But let me explain.  I am a long time film shooter, and have been shooting film since 1974, so I think that I know my films.  And I have shot a “LOT” of film of numerous types, and speeds over all of those years, so I am immediately familiar with almost all of the types of effects that Exposure2 contains.  And just for reference; when I last counted, my total of frames of film shot was well in excess of over 600,000 images, and still growing!

So, I was excited to load this program up, and take it for a real test drive.

As with virtually all of the software programs coming out of Alien Skin, the install process went flawlessly, and in very little time I had Exposure2 loaded up, and ready to run.
I should also tell everyone out there that Exposure2 is only built as a “Plugin” for digital editing programs, and is not a stand alone piece of software.  And like virtually all of my jillions of plugins, I  ran Exposure2 from Adobe Photoshop CS3.

On to the filters:   The Exposure 2 filter palette is accessed via the Photoshop CS3 filters pulldown, and there are really only two main choices; Black & White, or Color.  These submenus take the user directly to the entire listing of options available.

One of the neatest features of the preview window is the ability to view the image via  9 different Split-screen(or  full) (more…)